Lucky
by meanwhiletimely
Summary: Ginny knows better than anyone what Bellatrix is capable of. [Tom/Ginny, Bellatrix/Voldemort]


**LUCKY**

"Bellatrix was madly, romantically in love with Voldemort."  
_— J.K. Rowling_

"Ginny simply loved me."  
_— Tom Riddle_

* * *

**I.**

There is an old portrait of a girl in a blue dress buried face down beneath a pile of old boxes and spellbooks and left to rot in the Grimmauld Place attic.

She looks like Sirius would if he were a girl, all high cheekbones and stormy grey eyes. When Ginny turns her over and brushes the dust away, she blinks slowly and yawns as if she's been asleep for a long, long time.

She is thirteen, and her name is Bella.

Bella speaks in a lilting, upper-class-accented voice that makes Ginny think of the princesses in her childhood stories. Her favorite class at Hogwarts is Astronomy, but she's rubbish at Charms. She's good at dueling, though, better than most boys, and she likes Quidditch, just like Ginny, but her parents would never allow her to play. She has two sisters, but no brothers, and far too many cousins. She doesn't want to get married, but someday she knows she must. All girls must.

"Not me," Ginny says defiantly. "I won't belong to anyone." _Never again.  
_"Me neither," says Bella. "Not ever."

There's something about the way she looks out from the frame then, red lips curving upward in a knife-like smile, that makes Ginny shiver in inexplicable dread, so she replaces the portrait underneath its books and boxes, ignoring Bella's indignant shout, and rushes back downstairs to join the others, hurrying too quickly as she always does past the room with the rattling cabinet, where Tom lurks in boggart form—downstairs to talk of present-day Tom, and _Harry_.

Harry the Chosen One, Harry her savior, Harry with his black hair and pale skin and bright eyes that sometimes flash and flare in a way that sends a familiar chill up Ginny's spine, Harry: the only one who could possibly understand.

_I forgot_, he'd said, stricken and embarrassed, and Ginny had wanted to cry or scream or both. _  
Lucky you._

Harry doesn't look up, but Sirius glances at her strangely when she enters the drawing room, something sinister passing across his hollowed features, and when Ginny finds herself back in the attic the next day, drawn once more to the girl in the blue dress in a way she can't quite explain, the portrait is gone.

* * *

**II.**

Ginny cannot remember exactly when she first heard the name _Bellatrix Lestrange._

It might have been that chilling moment in fourth year when Neville turned to her and told her, with tears shining in his eyes and an angry, agonized contortion to his mouth, just _why_, exactly, he had been raised by his grandmother. It might have been a few days earlier, in a grim, blaring Prophet headline. Perhaps her parents said the name once, when she was just a child, speaking of darker days, or maybe someone at school—but it doesn't matter, in the end, because Ginny knows, when she thinks on it with a tight, coiling feeling in her stomach that _Bellatrix Lestrange_ existed somewhere deep within her subconscious understanding long before she crept haunting and unbidden into her day-to-day thoughts; somewhere a small, serious girl in a blue dress is smiling.

_And you know it's bound to be bad with _her _on the loose again, _Professor Sinistra mutters quietly to Professor Sprout when she thinks no students are listening. _Mad as her cousin and twice as dangerous—do you remember the Fenwick affair? _Nasty_, that was… _Her voice lowers suddenly as she glances quickly to see that the class is still busy with their assignments, and Ginny ducks behind her books, straining to hear. _They say she was in love with him, you know, _Sinistra whispers conspiratorially, and Sprout gasps._ With her cousin? I always did hear whispers— _Sinistra hisses impatiently, _Of course not. With _Him_. _There is a heavy moment of silence, and then understanding lends a new, terrified weight to Sprout's next words. _With…with_ _You-Know-Who? Surely—but that's—_

_Insane? Of course it is, _says Sinistra, a thrilled little shiver in her voice at the thought of something so grotesque, so unbelievably horrifying._ I once heard— _Michael taps her on the shoulder asking to borrow a quill, and Ginny is pulled back to the present with a sickening jolt.

She doesn't know what exactly draws her to _that _section in the library the next day—the one _He _took her to so many times, the one full of books she wishes she could say she's never opened, the one containing knowledge she's not supposed to have. _History of Magic project, _she says casually, waving a permission slip from months ago and throwing in an easy smile. _Those Goblin wars were _gruesome_, weren't they? _But Goblin warfare isn't what she reads about later that night, in bed with the curtains tightly drawn, eyes burning through every page with a painful intensity.

_All speculation on the extent of the House of Black's involvement with the Dark Lord is purely guesswork and conjecture, with basis in supposition and hearsay rather than in concrete fact, _says the 'Toujours Pur' chapter in "Darkness Rising", _but a few distinct details are generally agreed upon as truth. First, that while Sirius Black did not join forces with the Dark Lord until late 1980, his cousin Bellatrix had been training privately with him since the age of 16 at the latest and was already a devoted follower by the time she graduated Hogwarts. Their sexual relationship is alluded to in several surviving letters and interrogation transcripts (see Appendix C), and it was reportedly common knowledge among the Death Eaters of the time that her feelings for the Dark Lord went far beyond those of any ordinary follower…_

Ginny shuts the book, heart racing, before it delves too deeply into the specific gory details of Bellatrix's sins. _She loved him. _Since she was only a young girl…

_I won't belong to anyone.  
Me neither_, she'd said. _Not ever._

That night, Tom places roses in her hair and crushes them until they bleed, until the red blood of the rosebuds fades into the red of her hair, and the smell of death is almost suffocating. _You're just like her, Ginevra, _says the cold, sibilant voice coiling through her nightmares (always). _I saw her in you, you know._

_No_, murmurs Ginny, twisting and contorting in sweat-soaked sheets, darkness leaking through her cracks, cold lips pressed to her cheek, bone-white fingers on her neck, but he squeezes, and tells her in a hiss: _Yes. Your passion, your power, your lust, your _love—_all were hers first, before they were mine. Before you were mine._

_You didn't know her then, _she chokes out painfully._ You couldn't have._

Tom looks puzzled at that, his sharp, handsome features twisting into a perverse mockery of innocent confusion. _But I've always known her, Ginevra, just as I've always known you. A god knows his worshippers. The devil knows his servants._

She awakens with a scream.

* * *

**III.**

If Bella was a princess, Bellatrix is a _monster_—Dark magic sizzles and crackles around her like a cloak, or a shroud. She is at Tom's side, always, and the way she looks at him is all too horrifyingly familiar.

_I could have been you_, thinks Ginny, dueling her in a furious haze of tears and screams. Hermione and Luna are at her side now, providing backup that Ginny neither wants nor needs. "She's mine!" she screams, ignoring Bellatrix's shrieking laughter, ignoring Harry's body left forgotten by the forest, ignoring _Tom._

"You can't take her alone, Ginny!" Hermione is shouting as she ducks and swerves and throws up every spell in her considerable mental library. "You don't know what she's capable of!"

Ginny was only eleven years old when she became immersed in Darkness, _his_ concentrated power simmering beneath her skin. The wand she now wields once performed spells beyond the realm of any ordinary magic, enchantments too horrific and grotesque to have a name.

Ginny knows better than anyone what Bellatrix is capable of, just as Harry knows—_knew_—the same for Tom. And Tom needs Bellatrix the way he once needed her: his twisted tool. His finest instrument. _She'll take that from him.  
_For Fred. For Neville. For Tonks. For Sirius. For Harry.

_I could have been you, _thinks Ginny, _but I'm _not.

Bellatrix tilts her head to the side, looking at Ginny with vague, detached curiosity, red lips parted slightly, and Ginny thinks of all that she could say. _I know what it's like. I know what he's like. I know how he's claimed you, controlled you, destroyed you._

"But I don't pity you," Ginny says aloud, cool and dispassionate, fury melting and molding into a cold, lethal calm._ "_Not anymore."

Bellatrix's lips twist into a snarl, form the words—and then green death is flashing past so fast Ginny has no time to move. They will talk afterward of her mother's fearlessness in battle, her ruthless battle cry, but all Ginny will remember is Bellatrix's widened grey eyes, and Tom's scream.

Because then there is _Harry_, mad and brilliant and shaken and _alive_, and the love bursting out of Ginny at the sight of him is noble. Selfless. Pure. Powerful. Stronger than darkness. Stronger than death. Stronger than any of Tom's games or lies. Harry doesn't want to own her—only to save her.

_Lucky you_, she'd said to Harry, but perhaps it's Ginny who's the lucky one, after all.


End file.
